Age is just a number, and agelessness means not buying into the idea that a number determines everything from your state of health to your attractiveness to your value.
Contrast increases the splendour of beauty, but it disturbs its influence; it adds to its attractiveness, but diminishes its power.
Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.
Without some strong motive to the contrary, men united by the pursuit of a clearly defined common aim of irresistible attractiveness naturally coalesce; and since they coalesce naturally, they are clearly right in coalescing and find their advantage in it.
With this announcement he rose from his chair, and stood, leaning his arm on the marble mantelpiece: in that attitude his shape was seen plainly as well as his face; his unusual breadth of chest, disproportionate almost to his length of limb. I am sure most people would have thought him an ugly man; yet there was so much unconscious pride in his port; so much ease in his demeanour; such a look of complete indifference to his own external appearance; so haughty a reliance on the power of other qualities, intrinsic or adventitious, to atone for the lack of mere personal attractiveness, that, in looking at him, one inevitably shared the indifference, and, even in a blind, imperfect sense, put faith in the confidence.
She became so excited and agitated during all these explanations and confessions that General Epanchin was highly gratified, and considered the matter satisfactorily arranged once for all. But the once bitten Totski was twice shy, and looked for hidden snakes among the flowers. However, the special point to which the two friends particularly trusted to bring about their object (namely, Gania's attractiveness for Nastasia Philipovna), stood out more and more prominently; the pourparlers had commenced, and gradually even Totski began to believe in the possibility of success.
The characteristic productions of the third among the modern schools are monochromatic and translucid enamels. All students of the ceramic art know that the monochrome porcelains of China owe their beauty to the fact that the colour is in the glaze, not under it. The ceramist finds no difficulty in applying a uniform coat of pigment to porcelain biscuit, and covering the whole with a diaphanous glaze. The colour is fixed and the glaze set by secondary firing at a lower temperature than that necessary for hardening the _pâte_. Such porcelains, however, lack the velvet-like softness and depth of tone so justly prized in the genuine monochrome, where the glaze itself contains the colouring matter, _pâte_ and glaze being fired simultaneously at the same high temperature. It is apparent that a vitrified enamel may be made to perform, in part at any rate, the function of a porcelain glaze. Acting upon that theory, the experts of Tokyo and Nagoya have produced many very beautiful specimens of monochrome enamel--yellow (canary or straw), _rose du Barry_, liquid-dawn, red, aubergine purple, green (grass or leaf), dove-grey and lapis lazuli blue. The pieces do not quite reach the level of Chinese monochrome porcelains, but their inferiority is not marked. The artist's great difficulty is to hide the metal base completely. A monochrome loses much of its attractiveness when the colour merges into a metal rim, or when the interior of a vase is covered with crude unpolished paste. But to spread and fix the enamel so that neither at the rim nor in the interior shall there be any break of continuity, or any indication that the base is copper, not porcelain, demands quite exceptional skill. Entry: A
BOUDIN, EUGÈNE (1824-1898), French painter of the _paysage de mer_, was the son of a pilot. Born at Honfleur he was cabin-boy for a while on board the rickety steamer that plied between Havre and Honfleur across the estuary of the Seine. But before old age came on him, Boudin's father abandoned seafaring, and the son gave it up too, having of course no real vocation for it, though he preserved to his last days much of a sailor's character,--frankness, accessibility, open-heartedness. Boudin the elder now established himself as stationer and frame-maker; this time in the greater seaport town of Havre; and Eugène helped in the little business, and, in stolen hours, produced certain drawings. That was a time at which the romantic outlines of the Norman coast engaged Isabey, and the green wide valleys of the inland country engaged Troyon; and Troyon and Isabey, and Millet too, came to the shop at Havre. Young Boudin found his desire to be a painter stimulated by their influence; his work made a certain progress, and the interest taken in the young man resulted in his being granted for a short term of years by the town of his adoption a pension, that he might study painting. He studied partly in Paris; but whatever individuality he possessed in those years was hidden and covered, rather than disclosed. An instance of tiresome, elaborate labour--good enough, no doubt, as groundwork, and not out of keeping with what at least was the popular taste of that day--is his "Pardon of Sainte Anne de la Palud," a Breton scene, of 1858, in which he introduced the young Breton woman who was immediately to become his wife. This conscientious and unmoving picture hangs in the museum of Havre, along with a hundred later, fresher, thoroughly individual studies and sketches, the gift of Boudin's brother, Louis Boudin, after the painter's death. Re-established at Honfleur, Boudin was married and poor. But his work gained character and added, to merely academic correctness, character and charm. He was beginning to be himself by 1864 or 1865--that was the first of such periods of his as may be accounted good--and, though not at that time so fully a master of transient effects of weather as he became later, he began then to paint with a success genuinely artistic the scenes of the harbour and the estuary, which no longer lost vivacity by deliberate and too obvious completeness. The war of 1870-71 found Boudin impecunious but great, for then there had well begun the series of freshly and vigorously conceived canvases and panels, which record the impressions of a precursor of the Impressionists in presence of the Channel waters, and of those autumn skies, or skies of summer, now radiant, now uncertain, which hung over the small ports and the rocky or chalk-cliff coasts, over the watering-places, Trouville, Dieppe, and over those larger harbours, with _port_ and _avant-port_ and _bassin_, of Dunkirk, of Havre. In the war time, Boudin was in Brittany and then in the Low Countries. About 1875-1876 he was at Rotterdam and Bordeaux. That great bird's-eye vision of Bordeaux which is in the Luxembourg dates from these years, and in these years he was at Rotterdam, the companion of Jongkind, with whom he had so much in common, but whose work, like his, free and fearless and unconventional, can never be said with accuracy to have seriously influenced his own. Doing excellent things continually through all the 'seventies, when he was in late middle age--gaining scope in colour, having now so many notes--faithful no longer wholly to his amazing range of subtle greys, now blithe and silvery, now nobly deep--sending to the Salon great canvases, and to the few enlightened people who would buy them of him the _toile_ or panel of most moderate size on which he best of all expressed himself--Boudin was yet not acceptable to the public or to the fashionable dealer. The late 'eighties had to come and Boudin to be elderly before there was a sale for his work at any prices that were in the least substantial. Broadly speaking his work in those very 'eighties was not so good as the labour, essentially delicate and fresh and just, of some years earlier, nor had it always the attractiveness of the impulsive deliverances of some years later, when the inspired sketch was the thing that he generally stopped at. Old age found him strong and receptive. Only in the very last year of his life was there perceptible a positive deterioration. Not very long before it, Boudin, in a visit to Venice, had produced impressions of Venice for which much more was to be said than that they were not Ziem's. And the deep colouring of the South, on days when the sunshine blazes least, had been caught by him and presented nobly at Antibes and Villefranche. At last, resorting to the south again as a refuge from ill-health, and recognizing soon that the relief it could give him was almost spent, he resolved that it should not be for him, in the words of Maurice Barrès, a "_tombe fleurie_," and he returned, hastily, weak and sinking, to his home at Deauville, that he might at least die within sight of Channel waters and under Channel skies. As a "marine painter"--more properly as a painter of subjects in which water must have some part, and as curiously expert in the rendering of all that goes upon the sea, and as the painter too of the green banks of tidal rivers and of the long-stretched beach, with crinolined Parisienne noted as ably as the sailor-folk--Boudin stands alone. Beside him others are apt to seem rather theatrical--or if they do not romance they appear, perhaps, to chronicle dully. The pastels of Boudin--summary and economic even in the 'sixties, at a time when his painted work was less free--obtained the splendid eulogy of Baudelaire, and it was no other than Corot who, before his pictures, said to him: "You are the master of the sky." Entry: BOUDIN
Henri IV. himself has left a considerable correspondence, which is not destitute of literary merit, though not equal to the memoirs of his wife. What are commonly called Richelieu's _Memoirs_ were probably written to his order; his _Testament politique_ may be his own. Henri de Rohan (1579-1638) has not memoirs of the first value. Both this and earlier times found chronicle in the singular _Historiettes_ of Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux (1619-1690), a collection of anecdotes, frequently scandalous, reaching from the times of Henri IV. to those of Louis XIV., to which may be joined the letters of Guy Patin (1602-1676). The early years of the latter monarch and the period of the Fronde had the cardinal de Retz himself, than whom no one was certainly better qualified for historian, not to mention a crowd of others, of whom we may mention Madame de Motteville (1621-1689), Jean Hérault de Gourville (1625-1703), Mademoiselle de Montpensier ("La Grande Mademoiselle") (1627-1693), Conrart, Turenne and Mathieu Molé (1584-1663), François du Val, marquis de Fontenay-Mareuil (1594-1655), Arnauld d'Andilly (1588-1670). From this time memoirs and memoir writers were ever multiplying. The queen of them all is Madame de Sevigné (1626-1696), on whom, as on most of the great and better-known writers whom we have had and shall have to mention, it is impossible here to dwell at length. The last half of the century produced crowds of similar but inferior writers. The memoirs of Roger de Bussy-Rabutin (1618-1693) (author of a kind of scandalous chronicle called _Histoire amoureuse des Gaules_) and of Madame de Maintenon (1635-1719) perhaps deserve notice above the others. But this was in truth the style of composition in which the age most excelled. Memoir-writing became the occupation not so much of persons who made history, as was the case from Comines to Retz, as of those who, having culture, leisure and opportunity of observation, devoted themselves to the task of recording the deeds of others, and still more of regarding the incidents of the busy, splendid and cultivated if somewhat frivolous world of the court, in which, from the time of Louis XIV.'s majority, the political life of the nation and almost its whole history were centred. Many, if not most, of these writers were women, who thus founded the celebrity of the French lady for managing her mother-tongue, and justified by results the taste and tendencies of the blue-stockings and précieuses of the Hôtel Rambouillet and similar coteries. The life which these writers saw before them furnished them with a subject to be handled with the minuteness and care to which they had been accustomed in the ponderous romances of the _Clélie_ type, but also with the wit and terseness hereditary in France, and only temporarily absent in those ponderous compositions. The efforts of Balzac and the Academy supplied a suitable language and style, and the increasing tendency towards epigrammatic moralizing, which reached its acme in La Rochefoucauld (1663-1680) and La Bruyère (1639-1696), added in most cases point and attractiveness to their writings. Entry: J
ARNOLD, SIR EDWIN (1832-1904), British poet and journalist, was born on the 10th of June 1832, and was educated at the King's school, Rochester; King's College, London; and University College, Oxford, where in 1852 he gained the Newdigate prize for a poem on Belshazzar's feast. On leaving Oxford he became a schoolmaster, and went to India as principal of the government Sanskrit College at Poona, a post which he held during the mutiny of 1857, when he was able to render services for which he was publicly thanked by Lord Elphinstone in the Bombay council. Returning to England in 1861 he worked as a journalist on the staff of the _Daily Telegraph_, a newspaper with which he continued to be associated for more than forty years. It was he who, on behalf of the proprietors of the _Daily Telegraph_ in conjunction with the _New York Herald_, arranged for the journey of H.M. Stanley to Africa to discover the course of the Congo, and Stanley named after him a mountain to the north-east of Albert Edward Nyanza. Arnold must also be credited with the first idea of a great trunk line traversing the entire African continent, for in 1874 he first employed the phrase "a Cape to Cairo railway" subsequently popularized by Cecil Rhodes. It was, however, as a poet that he was best known to his contemporaries. _The Light of Asia_ appeared in 1879 and won an immediate success, going through numerous editions both in England and America. It is an Indian epic, dealing with the life and teaching of Buddha, which are expounded with much wealth of local colour and not a little felicity of versification. The poem contains many lines of unquestionable beauty; and its immediate popularity was rather increased than diminished by the twofold criticism to which it was subjected. On the one hand it was held by Oriental scholars to give a false impression of Buddhist doctrine; while, on the other, the suggested analogy between Sakyamuni and Christ offended the taste of some devout Christians. The latter criticism probably suggested to Arnold the idea of attempting a second narrative poem of which the central figure should be the founder of Christianity, as the founder of Buddhism had been that of the first. But though _The Light of the World_ (1891), in which this idea took shape, had considerable poetic merit, it lacked the novelty of theme and setting which had given the earlier poem much of its attractiveness; and it failed to repeat the success attained by _The Light of Asia_. Arnold's other principal volumes of poetry were _Indian Song of Songs_ (1875), _Pearls of the Faith_ (1883), _The Song Celestial_ (1885), _With Sadi in the Garden_ (1888), _Potiphar's Wife_ (1892) and _Adzuma_ (1893). In his later years Arnold resided for some time in Japan, and his third wife was a Japanese lady. In _Seas and Lands_ (1891) and _Japonica_ (1892) he gives an interesting study of Japanese life. He received the order of C.S.I. on the occasion of the proclamation of Queen Victoria as empress of India in 1877, and in 1888 was created K.C.I.E. He also possessed decorations conferred by the rulers of Japan, Persia, Turkey and Siam. Sir Edwin Arnold died on the 24th of March 1904. Entry: ARNOLD
_Habits and Life-Relations._--The attractiveness of the Lepidoptera and the conspicuous appearance of many of them have led to numerous observations on their habits. The method of feeding of the imago by the suction of liquids has already been mentioned in connexion with the structure of the maxillae and the food-canal. Nectar from flowers is the usual food of moths and butterflies, most of which alight on a blossom before thrusting the proboscis into the corolla of the flower, while others--the hawk moths (Sphingidae) for example--remain poised in the air in front of the flower by means of excessively rapid vibration of the wings, and quickly unrolling the proboscis sip the nectar. Certain flowers with remarkably long tubular corollas seem to be specially adapted for the visits of hawk moths. Some Lepidoptera have other sources of food-supply. The juices of fruit are often sought for, and certain moths can pierce the envelope of a succulent fruit with the rough cuticular outgrowths at the tips of the maxillae, so as to reach the soft tissue within. Animal juices attract other Lepidoptera, which have been observed to suck blood from a wounded mammal; while putrid meat is a familiar "lure" for the gorgeous "purple emperor" butterfly (_Apatura iris_). The water of streams or the dew on leaves may be frequently sought by Lepidoptera desirous of quenching their thirst, possibly with fatal results, the insects being sometimes drowned in rivers in large numbers. Members of several families of the Lepidoptera--the Hepialidae, Lasiocampidae and Saturniidae, for example--have the maxillae vestigial or aborted, and take no food at all after attaining the winged condition. In such insects there is a complete "division of labour" between the larval and the imaginal instars, the former being entirely devoted to nutritive, the latter to reproductive functions. Entry: FIG
The Paris Exhibition of 1889 marked an important change in the policy which had previously characterized the management of these gatherings. The funds were contributed partly by the state, which voted 17,000,000 francs, and by the municipality of Paris, which gave 8,000,000. A guarantee fund amounting to 23,124,000 francs was raised, and on this security a sum of 18,000,000 francs was obtained and paid into the coffers of the administration. The bankers who advanced this sum recouped themselves by the issue of 1,200,000 "bons," each of 25 francs, Every bon contained 25 admissions, valued at 1 franc, and certain privileges in the shape of participation in a lottery, the grand prix being £20,000. The calculations of the promoters were tolerably accurate. The attendances reached the then unprecedented number of 32,350,297, of whom 25,398,609 paid in entrance tickets and 2,723,366 entered by season tickets. A sum of 2,307,999 francs was obtained by concessions for restaurants and "side-shows," upon which the administration relied for much of the attractiveness of the exhibition. The total expenditure was 44,000,000 francs, and there was a small surplus. The space covered in the Champ de Mars, the Trocadero, the Palais d'Industrie, the Invalides and the Quai d'Orsay was 72 acres, as compared with 66 acres in 1878 and 41 acres in 1867. Amongst the novelties was the Eiffel Tower, 1000 ft. in height, and a faithful reproduction of a street in Cairo. The system of international juries was continued, but instead of gold, silver and copper medals, diplomas of various merits were granted, each entitling the holder to a uniform medal of bronze. Some of the "side-shows," although perhaps pecuniary successes, did not add to the dignity of the exhibition. The date at which it was held, the Centenary of the French Revolution, did not commend it to several European governments. Austria, Hungary, Belgium, China, Egypt, Spain, Great Britain, Italy, Luxemburg, Holland, Peru, Portugal, Rumania and Russia took part, but not officially, while Germany, Sweden, Turkey and Montenegro were conspicuous by their absence. On the other hand, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, the United States, Greece, Guatemala, Morocco, Mexico, Nicaragua, Norway, Paraguay, Salvador, the South African Republic, Switzerland, Uruguay and Venezuela sent commissioners, who were accredited to the government of the French Republic. The total number of exhibitors was 61,722, of which France contributed 33,937, and the rest of the world 27,785. The British and colonial section was under the management of the Society of Arts, which obtained a guarantee fund of £16,800, and, in order to recoup itself for its expenditure, made a charge to exhibitors of 5s. per sq. ft. for the space occupied. There were altogether 1149 British exhibitors, of whom 429 were in the Fine Arts section. One of the features of the exhibition was the number of congresses and conferences held in connexion with it. Entry: A
Of Calvin's early years only a few notices remain. His father destined him from the first for an ecclesiastical career, and paid for his education in the household of the noble family of Hangest de Montmor. In May 1521 he was appointed to a chaplaincy attached to the altar of La Gésine in the cathedral of Noyon, and received the tonsure. The actual duties of the office were in such cases carried out by ordained and older men for a fraction of the stipend. The plague having visited Noyon, the young Hangests were sent to Paris in August 1523, and Calvin accompanied them, being enabled to do so by the income received from his benefice. He lived with his uncle and attended as an out-student the Collège de la Marche, at that time under the regency of Mathurin Cordier, a man of character, learning and repute as a teacher, who in later days followed his pupil to Switzerland, taught at Neuchâtel, and died in Geneva in 1564. In dedicating to him his _Commentary on the First Epistle to the Thessalonians,_ as "eximiae pietatis et doctrinae viro," he declares that so had he been aided by his instruction that whatever subsequent progress he had made he only regarded as received from him, and "this," he adds, "I wish to testify to posterity that if any utility accrue to any from my writings they may acknowledge it as having in part flowed from thee." From the Collège de la Marche he removed to the Collège de Montaigu,[2] where the atmosphere was more ecclesiastical and where he had for instructor a Spaniard who is described as a man of learning and to whom Calvin was indebted for some sound training in dialectics and the scholastic philosophy. He speedily outstripped all his competitors in grammatical studies, and by his skill and acumen as a student of philosophy, and in the college disputations gave fruitful promise of that consummate excellence as a reasoner in the department of speculative truth which he afterwards displayed. Among his friends were the Hangests (especially Claude), Nicolas and Michel Cop, sons of the king's Swiss physician, and his own kinsman Pierre Robert, better known as Olivétan. Such friendships testify both to the worth and the attractiveness of his character, and contradict the old legend that he was an unsociable misanthrope. Pleased with his success, the canons at Noyon gave him the curacy of St Martin de Marteville in September 1527. After holding this preferment for nearly two years, he exchanged it in July 1529 for the cure of Pont L'Évêque, a village near to Noyon, and the place to which his father originally belonged. He appears to have been not a little elated by his early promotion, and although not ordained, he preached several sermons to the people. But though the career of ecclesiastical preferment was thus early opened to him, Calvin was destined not to become a priest. A change came over the mind both of his father and himself respecting his future career. Gérard Cauvin began to suspect that he had not chosen the most lucrative profession for his son, and that the law offered to a youth of his talents and industry a more promising sphere.[3] He was also now out of favour with the cathedral chapter at Noyon. It is said also that John himself, on the advice of his relative, Pierre Robert Olivétan, the first translator of the Bible into French, had begun to study the Scriptures and to dissent from the Roman worship. At any rate he readily complied with his father's suggestion, and removed from Paris to Orleans (March 1528) in order to study law under Pierre Taisan de l'Etoile, the most distinguished jurisconsult of his day. The university atmosphere here was less ascetic than at Paris, but Calvin's ardour knew no slackening, and such was his progress in legal knowledge that he was frequently called upon to lecture, in the absence of one or other of the regular staff. Other studies, however, besides those of law occupied him while in this city, and moved by the humanistic spirit of the age he eagerly developed his classical knowledge. "By protracted vigils," says Beza, "he secured indeed a solid erudition and an excellent memory; but it is probable he at the same time sowed the seeds of that disease (dyspepsia) which occasioned him various illnesses in after life, and at last brought upon him premature death."[4] His friends here were Melchior Wolmar, a German schoolmaster and a man of exemplary scholarship and character, François Daniel, Francois de Connam and Nicolas Duchemin; to these his earliest letters were written. Entry: CALVIN